Anglia Ruskin University

Renaissance texts are brought to life through performance, film, illustration, literary appropriation, and modernised editions. All ages to some degree reinvent the past, analysing the culture of a period through the lens of the present. Frequently such interventions can draw attention to their own modernity. Clear cut examples are Baz Lurhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Jane Smiley's updated retelling of King Lear, 1000 Acres (1992). But there are more subtle ways in which the Renaissance has been reinvented in our own image, particularly within academia. Criticism, for example, reflects the preoccupations of the critic as much as it illuminates the productions of the past. Even within historicism, a branch of literary studies characterised by its wish to recuperate the past, to 'speak with the dead', this trait is clearly apparent.

A comparison between 'old' historicist E.M.W. Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture (1942) and Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self -Fashioning (1980) reveals as much about the gap between mid and late twentieth-century attitudes as it does about the Renaissance (or the Early Modern period as it has now been rebranded.) Even in one of the most scholarly and apparently almost scientific branches of literary studies, textual criticism, practice is affected by fashion and ideology. The Complete Works of Shakespeare with which we are presented by, say, Alexander Pope (1725) is very different from any modern edition of that text.

Reinventing the Renaissance benefits from the bequest of Shirley Skinner-Young, whose estate contributes towards research in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We currently have six PhD students working on Renaissance literature and culture.